Seems like controlled momentum will still be a way better and more reliable support feat than rene capstone? Or am I missing something about the other rene changes that would push it over the edge?

^^ Controlled Momentum is way more reliable for buffing damage atm. Chaos Magic w/ the 20 sec cd makes what otherwise would have been awesome, meh, super meh, especially w/ only 5% proc chance on power activation. Chaos Magic would be sweet if they removed the cd, and allowed the 10 sec length to be refreshed if that particular buff proc'ed again. The chance of procing the same chaos magic twice in 10 secs is an exercise in probability I don't feel like doing right now, it depends on power cd's, animation times, and other things. But on any particular activation of a power, the chance to proc a specific chaos magic buff is 0.05 * 1/6, which is less than 1%, ~ 0.833%.

As far as I can tell after messing around for a short time on preview, the changes as they currently are have moved damage buffs around, and cut cp in half, which is about a 24% damage reduction on frozen targets, and about the same vs cc immune targets (not counting damage loss from fixing bugged feats). I was able to solo Kessels last night, but it felt like I was doing much lass damage than on live, and took 4 more minutes to complete (solo). Haven't had a chance to set up ACT yet.

I mean, before this mod, my support build was Renegade/Opp, for Nightmare Wizardry schenanigans. I suppose if you can reliably get CA from other sources NW isn't that great, but with things like the Razorwood companion, CA damage is pretty intense.

Seems like controlled momentum will still be a way better and more reliable support feat than rene capstone? Or am I missing something about the other rene changes that would push it over the edge?

When testing Chaos Magic on Preview I constantly had around 3 of the 6 buffs up (not proccing from DoTs) so I think it definetly isn't a bad choice to pick Renegade.

I was able to average 2/6 of the buffs up at any one time, but to be honest, it's really the chaos fury that people are going to want. There was a thread about the difference between GF ITF vs CW/Rene Chaos Fury I read in the past. The general consensus was that GF won if they had enough recovery to keep itf up close to 100% compared to about the theoretical 1/3 uptime of Chaos Fury. The way the feat works on preview now makes it even more obvious, GF's ITF is better. The other buffs from Chaos Magic might be more useful in pvp however.

Still, I think they should get rid of the 20 second CD and allow the buffs to be refreshed. If they did remove the CD, lets simplify things and assume one can activate 10 powers in 10 seconds, the probability of procing the same Chaos Magic buff (Chaos Fury) before its duration ends is:

1 - (0.99166)^10 = 0.0802...

or about an 8% chance to refresh the same buff if you use fast activating powers (i.e. disintegrate, RoE, IT, IR, OF, SB, CC, etc). Even with that, ITF would most likely still have way better uptime than Chaos Fury, and the new Chaos Fury would probably average out to an overall reduced damage buff than old Chaos Fury. At least in theory.

Anyways, if what you're after is a flat damage buff for the party w/ CW, the obvious choice is still to use Controlled Momentum.

I played around on preview with different powers and passives but still too early to change up feat combinations, though I don't expect from the notes that there is anything I'm currently not slotting and must change to. I do appreciate the flat damage boost along with an additional boost to cold abilities, but there appears to be offsetting nerfs sprinkled in that are essentially negating many of those increases on core or popular feats and powers.

At this stage I can only say that it feels "just ok", but smarter people than me will be able to glean clearer data from ACT logs and testing than I'll be able to provide. I am happy to see some of those people posting here as the length of this particular feedback thread is a little discouraging, but probably indicative of how small the hard-core CW community has shrunk over the mods.

I hope we are not being "lowballed" here in anticipation of back and forth haggling over buffs needed to bring the CW back into the mainstream. @noworries#8859 please know that CW is not currently OP by any stretch. I'll play and test some more but my first impression is that I like that that there will be a little more diversity in options but if feels like you may need a little more of a boost than 25%.

I've played around quite a bit on my CW and there's a few things I've noticed.

First is that our aoe is considerably weaker initially and barely stronger later. This is mostly due to the nerf to chilling presence and our incapacity to build arcane stacks quickly. Spell storm is still required for aoe otherwise the damage is EXTREMELY slow. I imagine MoF to be even worse.

Personally, I think that arcane stacks should affect every single spells by default rather than being required (and it is required now) to use arcane presence. Change arcane presence slightly by making it give something else in addition to the recharge speed.

Chilling presence also needs to be buffed a little bit but not to the previous levels. I'd recommend making the freeze portion deals triple the effect of the buff (still less than it used to be). Keep the rest as is.

Evocation is okish but it's still not good enough to be used because it has no effect on the functionality of spells. I'd suggest to bring back the damage back to 20% but if an aoe spell hit only one target, the effect is doubled (meaning 40% damage from evocation). This would help without making the feature broken.

Spell storm, still a fine feature, dead in single target, still alive in aoe. Fine by me

Arcane power field is just clunky. You need to get the ball rolling by using a daily power (which isn't always available at the start) and it only tick every 2 seconds. I'd recommend making the effect proc as soon as we enter combat and have it then be reapplied upon using a daily power, this way this removes a LOT of its clunkyness (this is now a word :P). In addition, bring it back to ticking every second instead of every 2 seconds. Adjust damage accordingly.

Renegade capstone needs to be adjusted a little bit. First, 6 random buffs is, imo, too much. I think it would be better to condense them into 4 buffs instead. I'm not sure if it can proc from dots or only on spell use but I could hardly see the benefit from it. It needs to be more consistent by either allowing dots to proc it or by increasing proc change. If it can only proc from spell use, then we are looking at an average of 1 proc every 20 seconds~ which is just awful.

Overall, I'm still getting used to the changes and it is a pretty significant playstyle change. Still, it's good to see our concerns addressed.

Is it too late to flat out remove imprisonment? You could create a skill called blink (stealth), a summon (anything really), decoy, a wind attack, a buff encounter, a heal encounter, just anything....

I'm sure you guys have stats on how many cws use that skill. Like 0.03% of wizards use it and 0.029% used it just to see what it was.

I'm reasonably sure that I've used Imprisonment exactly once, when I was a returning player. I used it only once because, even not knowing much of anything about the state of the game then, I could read the tooltip and know that it would be useless; I just wanted to see if the animation was interesting.

Class Features:

Frost Wave (Reworked): When you activate a Daily power, you apply 6 stacks of Chill and Freeze foes within 30' of you. You are also refunded 5% of your Action Points over the next 10 secondsFrost Wave: No longer increases effect duration per rankFrost Wave: Now increases the amount of Action Points refunded by 5% per rankFrost Wave (New): Enemies that are already Frozen have their Freeze duration refreshed

This is a neat effect at first glance, but is it useful?

In a single-target situation, the CW is generally fighting a (control-immune) boss.

In an AoE situation, the CW is most likely using Oppressive Force, which is an AoE hard CC that makes the short-lived freezing effect redundant.

The Action Point refund is potent, but all of the Dailies in the world don't help much if your damage is lacking, and it appears difficult to justify slotting this class feature when it's running up against the likes of Swath of Destruction, Storm Spell, Chilling Presence, Arcane Presence, etc.

I won't deny that instantly freezing all surrounding enemies is a fun and flashy power, but I'm not really seeing the overall advantage, and I'm not sure that the added AP gain is enough to compensate.

Would Imprisonment even be usable if it didn't give the target damage immunity and didn't have the ridiculous cooldown?

Like, ACTUAL control would be really awesome. But because everything in the game is basically control immune ... why bother?

No, you're right; it would still be useless. There's no practical value in incapacitating a single target. Even if it could prevent a boss from acting, its application would be niche at best unless Cryptic introduced boss mechanics that HAD to be interrupted by such a power, which they probably would not do since it would make CWs mandatory.

Is it too late to flat out remove imprisonment? You could create a skill called blink (stealth), a summon (anything really), decoy, a wind attack, a buff encounter, a heal encounter, just anything....

I'm sure you guys have stats on how many cws use that skill. Like 0.03% of wizards use it and 0.029% used it just to see what it was.

100% of CWs use it for entertainment purposes that involve 30% of the game's population.

Yeah, I've used it to mess with friends, but that's literally the only time I've ever used it. No one uses it in a standard rotation. It has zero use in the game.

If they actually made Imprisonment land correctly (as far too often it misses, especially if your target dodges or has an immunity frame for a split second e.g. frost giants), didn't have a clunky delay to know if it has landed or not, and there was a need for it (such as disabling a very strong or unkillable minion/mobs) then there might be a use for it.

Right now, Imprisonment is a sucky end-level power, sad considering that it could have been a very useful spell.

If Imprisonment were to stay, then to make it viable, it should be able to do damage while the target is imprisoned (sort of like an accelerated matter-deconstructive process going on while imprisoned), or be able to actually target bosses for a short duration (to give a bit of respite to the team when really needed). Or, it would imprison the mob for the whole duration of the fight, and if the mob were still imprisoned (i.e. the wizard was not killed) by the end of the fight, then it would actually *die* because there was no counter-spell cast.

yay!!! i got a buff, oh looky there...a nerf. a man that was born blind and has been deceased for 10 years coulda seen that coming..but YAY!! a buff..for once, now if this trend continues we should end up having more than just 1 or two set in stone ways to play this class. i have faith that we will get there some day

Thanks for the attention you are paying to CW's. I guess we will need to change the way we play, what I am most concerned about is bugs. So many changes means so many new bugs to one of the buggiest class ever. At the end, players will find the new bugs and play with them to get the most out of this class, as they always did.

There were a lot of changes to the CW. However, I think perhaps the changes just stagnate the CW (for another who knows how many mods) and nerf my playstyle instead! HAMSTER!

Considering Chilling Presence, which was a fixture of most ‘DPS’ builds in Mod 14, was reduced by 50%, now only giving 24% damage to mobs with 6 chill stacks, and 48% when frozen, this practically negates the base damage buff of 25% of control wizard powers, and is an actual nerf to damage against frozen targets by 23%. Trash clearing of mobs wasn’t a major issue, but a nerf is a nerf.

Now cold damage powers was increased by around 20%. Running ACT, the statistics of the damage I did with cold powers were approximately: Icy terrain 8%, chilling cloud 9%, conduit of ice 10%. So maybe accounting for around 27% of my overall damage, thus this would be around a 5% DPS increase.

Arcane mastery now only increases Arcane spells damage by 4% (per stack) up from 3% but now only applies to Arcane spells (previously it was for ALL damage). So this is a NERF (unless you use up a class feature to slot Arcane Presence). Disintegrate is probably the only arcane spell I have on my encounter slot at any given time, accounting for around 20% of my overall damage. So this can be seen as a 1% damage increase. However, for the rest of my damage I would lose the 15% damage buff, hence a 12% nerf. Net DPS nerf = 11%.

Arcane presence now increases the damage of cold, fire, lightning attacks by 1% per stack (4% at 4 points), for about a 20% damage increase to aforesaid attacks. Now previously it was only cold damage spells which benefitted from Arcane Presence, an increase of around 19.95%. If fire and lightning attacks account for, say, 60-75% of total damage, then this would be around a 12-15% buff if slotted, still underwhelming compared to chilling presence (there is no mention of whether Arcane Presence will retain the cooldown speed increase either).

Disintegrate dealing 100% (300% on mastery) more damage to foes below 25% HP. For mobs, this is probably going to be inconsequential, and hard to determine the actual DPS increase. Theoretically, however, this provides a 25% damage buff to disintegrate in a non-mastery slot. As above, with disintegrate about 20% of my overall damage, this is a 4% damage buff.

Blighting power gets a nerf of about 13.1% at full ranks for cold spells. If cold spells were around 27% of damage, this is a 3.5% DPS nerf.

Shatterstrike was nerfed, hard to predict what the DPS loss would be without actually testing this on mobs.

The thaumaturge buffs are so miniscule that they would unlikely change them to become the DPS path. Assailant was glaringly left out, even though it does not provide as much damage/benefits as capstones of other classes.

Chaos magic is also a mess. Now it has 6 effects to choose from, of which 5 of them are practically useless in end-game PvE, with a NERF to Chaotic Fury from 30% to 20%. If say 2-3 buffs could be conceivably concurrently up during a fight, then the damage buff would be from 6-10%, down from the 10% as it currently stands. So around a 4% nerf.

… and also a lot of random changes to powers which do not even see the light of day (and still won't!) in a self-respecting wizard’s rotation. Do they even play the CW?!?

So in summary, listing all the damage nerfs/buffs with my typical ACT damage composition:

Arcane Presence: 12-15% buff ONLY IF SLOTTED (still underwhelms compared to chilling presence – they probably will just nerf CP even more … smh)

Realistically, I would be using CP, so net damage to bosses is 1% better, cold damage 5% better, Disintegrate 4% buff, Arcane Mastery 11% worse, Blighting power 3.5% worse overall, and I would be using the Oppressor Capstone (which probably looks like a nerf to me).

Boost base damage by 30% (just to break even with the nerfs!) ideally 35-40% to make them semi-competitive with any of the other DPS classes! Even the SW got straight up damage boosts and animation time reductions without this corresponding nerf HAMSTERey!Make Abyss of Chaos crit and scale with buffsMake Assailant crit, scale with buffs and not have an HP limitationDon't remove cold and fire power to benefit from Arcane Mastery.

Brisk Teleport stacks when dodging multiple times.Uncontrolled Obliteration is not random, it picks a buff value equal to 1 of the 4 values:

5% 16.5% 33% 50%

The expected Average for the following 4 values is 26.125%, in contrast to the average of 5%-55% which would be 27.5%. However, in a test of over 1h of spamming ray of frost, I found the average increase to be not be either of those values and instead be closer to 18.3%, which indicates it is biased and so I drew up this table here:

As you can see, the buff is biased such that 40% of the time the lowest buff value is chosen, 30% of the time the 2nd lowest buff value is chosen, 20% of the time the 2nd highest buff value is chosen and 10% of the time the highest buff value is chosen. This is NOT working the way the feat is described.